Abstract

Using the technique of coupled waveform analysis, we have formulated a set of equations that rigorously describes forward electromagnetic scattering from double periodic structures. For geometries of practical interest the cost of solving these equations on traditional vector supercomputers is unacceptable, so we have developed a parallel algorithm for solving them on distributed memory multiprocessing systems, where the expected cost of computation is much lower. We have implemented our algorithm on a 1024-node hypercube nCUBE2 parallel supercomputer and tested it on various geometries arising in a laser diffraction study of integrated circuits. We will describe our algorithm, characterize its performance, and offer comparisons with implementations on a typical workstation and a vector supercomputer.

© 1992 Optical Society of America